


Misery loves company

by orphan_account



Series: unrelated tumblr shorts [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Jim doesnt die in this hes ready dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-20 18:58:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14267490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Richard Moriarty's estranged brother offs himself, and four days later some leather wearing thug shows up at his workplace with a briefcase.---an aimless story told in snippets with no real end goal or update philosophy





	1. Are you here to kill me?

**Author's Note:**

> I started these as snippets of a prompt-based drabble challenge-thing on a whim, so likely the chapters will be short, disjointed, and many

Richard Moriarty is manning the tickets counter when a tall and rugged looking man with a scar on his face steps up to the counter and sets down a briefcase.

Ordinarily, this is a peacable, relaxing post, where Richard spends most of his time watching the rolling hills of the countryside and only dealing with little old ladies as customers. They bring him sweets and other things, and recommend books that he should read (almost exclusively torid romances, so he has a stack of them by the door now, but has never read one).

Except, Richard notices, as his eyes follow the motion of the briefcase and land on the man’s leather glove-covered hands, today does not seem like it will follow suit.

The man removes his gloves and unclasps the briefcase. Richard looks back up at his face, at the stormy expression.

It must be one of his brother’s associates, he thinks bitterly. He wonders what’s in the briefcase. Gun with a massive silencer? Were they going to do this point blank?

“Are you here to kill me?” he asks.

The man startles, stops, and looks up at him from his briefcase-contents-rummaging. He gives Richard a strange look he can’t quite parse, and slowly turns the briefcase around so its contents are facing the station master.

It’s not a gun, it’s a stack of papers and two pens.

He looks closer.

“This is Jim Moriarty’s last will and testament,” the man says.

 

 


	2. It's never twins

It’s grief, he realizes, incredulous. The expression on the man’s face is grief.

“I don’t want it,” Richard tells him.

Now the expression is a very obvious, bitter anger.

“You have to sign these,” the man says in a low voice, much smoother than his rough exterior would have suggested, but no less menacing for it. “You have to sign to accept the totality of these assets designated to you, Richard Moriarty, before I can get the fuck on with settling the rest of this bastard’s things.”

Richard sets his mouth into a thin line.

He knows where his brother’s “assets” came from. He doesn’t want anything to do with drug money or stolen weapons or the blood of dead children.

“No,” he says, and he slides the ticketing window shut. Let him come in all guns ablazing, if he wants, he doesn’t have to do a damn thing he doesn’t want to.

You learn that early on, with someone like Jim for a brother, someone who’d rather taunt and dare you into cutting off your own hand than holding it down and swinging the axe.

He was a silver-tongued trickster with a weak stomach, and weak knees.

So what you do is you kick em in the knees, then run off and put on your headphones to tune them out. And, eventually, they get bored.

Richard had mastered the silent treatment. He could give people the silent treatment for days. Hell, it’d been 13 years since he last spoke to his brother.

His now deceased brother.

His twin, really (older by three minutes).

He didn’t regret anything. 


	3. Friendship

They're one too many beers in and both hunched over the kitchen table, papers spread everywhere, turning Richard's den into what he comically imagines the tax offices to look like, because Jim, his dear fucking brother Jim, has left a last game in the form of a treasure hunt that his instructions (and Moran) insist only Richard can solve. It's peppered with clues to solve that allude to shared childhood memories, and all the remembering has prompted copious amounts of drinking, in order to offset the remembering.

Richard could care less about what the whole puzzle leads to, but Moran is insistent he finish it and that the hitman get his fair share. Richard thinks that, really, he's just lonely and has no one to grieve with and so humors him, but they end up laughing so hard over some of the child-Jim stories that they're laughing through tears, and then it's just tears, and now it's just miserable, silent company.

"Perhaps," Moran starts, and Richard gives him a warning look that he ignores.

"Perhaps the real treasure--"

"Don't."

"--was the friendship we found along the way."

Richard tries to bludgeon Moran's head in with a book. Except it's a lightweight paperback and isnt effective at all, judging by the snorts and then choking laughter. Maybe he can give him a papercut at least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters are not strictly chronological


	4. Imitation. Flattery?

Moran stares at the yearbooks and family photo albums and then peers down at a photo of Richard posing with the rest of the drama club.

"I played the Storyteller," Richard tells him.

"So that was real?"

Richard rolls his eyes. Yes, he's heard about the identity theft.

"You're actually a Storyteller," Moran says, laughter in his tone.

"Jim had to have gotten that somewhere," Richard says, bitter. Gay, an out of work actor, a children's storytime reader, a cabbie for a brief stint. Jim took parts of his life and turned them into caricatures.

"I thought he just made that up," Moran continues.

Richard snorts.

"No, Jim rewrites, remixes, rehashes. Repurposes. At best reinvents. But he hasn't got an original bone in his body."

"Yeah, well," Moran says, uncaring about his plight. "You're a station master."

As if that's supposed to be some sort of insult.

He's not the one so unhappy and unfulfilled he went out killing others before putting a bullet through himself.

Richard looks at Moran, his thoughts more or less conveyed by his not rising to the bait. And by the looks of it, Moran agrees too.


	5. Snipers are patient

It turns out that the station's ticketing office is actually very secure, because Richard sits and waits and for the first five minutes or so, he worries that a window or door will break down and the man in the leather jacket will tumble in and when he rolls to his feet, will have a gun, and that gun will be pointed at Richard's face, and it'll be all 'just kidding, here to kill you anyway.'

 

It doesn't happen like that. It doesn't happen at all.

 

About 10, 12 minutes go by and then there's a knock at the window and Richard is on the far side of the office, far from the window, at an angle where it's impossible to get a direct hit at him, because Jim might not have been a criminal mastermind with a hired gun back when they were kids who would still play together, but they did still have slingshots and spitballs, and Richard isn't bad at pool. So he waits against the wall in that little spot between the filing cabinet and fire extinguisher and thinks about his life.

 

He's been pretty content, all things considered. No major regrets.

 

The knocking doesn't stop.

 

"Mr. Moriarty, are you in there?" 

 

Richard jumps up by reflex, then stops himself before he takes two steps. That's Doreen's voice, one of the tiny little old ladies who comes by often not to buy a train ticket but to meet up with friends. But once a week, she goes up to visit her children.

 

But perhaps the man is holding her hostage.

 

No, no, he has even more reason to answer if that is the case.

 

Richard makes it to her window, and she puts down her bills to pay for her ticket. He quickly rings it up for her.

 

"Mr. Moriarty, there is a sad looking man sitting on the waiting bench. He has been here for fifteen minutes, I saw him from across the street at the shop," she tells him.

 

He gives her a smile and tells her not to worry. Then she leaves, and he glares at him.

 

He's made a big show of settling in at the bench, and doesn't seem like he will be moving any time soon.

 

When Richard finishes his shift six hours later, he's still there. 


	6. Jim used to say

He nods, still drunk.

 

"Okay, but sometimes family is you, an ex-military sniper you picked up at a bar, and the world's only consulting detective," Moran slurs. "Jim used to say that all the time."

 

Richard rubs his hand across his face and then takes the rest of their beers and pours them down the sink. The man had had way more than Richard did, like he was playing a drinking game with really sketchy rules. Take a drink for every page we get through, hey.

 

"Alright we're going to stop drinking now," he says. The only response is a snore. 

 

It's a pity he didn't pick up more from his criminal mastermind of a brother, Richard thinks, because he has no idea how to dispose of a body. He supposes right here on the kitchen table was good enough, because if you were going to impose on someone like that you kind of deserved it. 

 

Perhaps pettily, on his way to his own room, picking up papers here and there and setting them to the side, he hoped really hard that Moran would wake up with a killer hangover.

 

Except after he brushes his teeth and changes for bed, he goes back so he can leave a bottle of water on the kitchen table.


End file.
